Earlier this month approximately 600 staff from 11 local schools came together at Alderbrook School for a joint Inset day. We represented both academies and maintained schools, as well as infant, junior, primary and secondary settings.
For those involved, this marked a significant milestone in our journey as we work to improve the outcomes of children and young people in our community.
Two years ago, we - a group of local headteachers - got in touch with The Reach Foundation. We admired its Cradle-to-Career Partnership, a national network of schools and trusts that establish effective place-based models of support.
In this network, schools are anchors at the centre of their communities. The collaborative model has shown promise in strengthening services around communities, and we were keen to introduce it to Solihull.
We convened the six primary and junior schools, each of which sends 30 children to Alderbook every September, along with the four infant schools that feed into them. All 11 headteachers agreed to join the collaboration, and so the South Solihull Partnership was formed.
Since September 2023 we have worked together across four key strands, making significant progress in each:
Developing all-through curricula
We have aligned elements of our geography curricula, including developing a shared language that is used with all students, from early years to A level, and have initially focused on improving one specific skill - decision-making - across all phases.
We plan to roll out this approach to other subjects, too, but began with geography because it was already a particularly strong subject for us all.
Professional development
We have formed a professional development programme for all 130 teaching assistants across the schools.
We launched this on the Inset day with a session led by educational psychologists, and are also designing a development programme to offer TAs training in supporting pupils who are exhibiting an increasing diversity of need in the classroom.
Improving transition
We are working to improve transition between schools for students and their families.
For example, working with the local music service, schools nominated vulnerable Year 6 students to take part in music workshops at Alderbrook before starting in September. These students reported feeling much better prepared for Year 7.
Alderbrook also ran a summer school, attended by more than half of the incoming cohort.
And colleagues across the schools now work more closely to share timely information about students and families, while staff in the next phase are meeting families much earlier.
Working with the wider community
Keen to always be learning more, we have also carried out a listening exercise with groups in our community, including with religious and local authority organisations. We have learned that many organisations are keen to work more closely with the schools but until now have not known how to initiate these relationships.
Over the past year an evening youth club has been set up at one primary in partnership with a local community interest company, and family hub outreach support has started at another.
Our collaborative Inset day
Building on these four areas of progress, we agreed early on to set a date for the Inset day, hoping to use it as a set piece to showcase the work that has taken place so far to all staff, and to broaden the scope of our collaboration. The other key objective was to highlight this work to local partners.
Despite logistical challenges, including heavy snowfall, the day was a resounding success.
Together the sessions communicated the challenges we face, both locally and nationally, particularly around closing the disadvantage gap, attendance and special educational needs and disabilities.
The feedback so far has been overwhelmingly positive: 90 per cent of attendees said they now have a greater understanding of the benefits of a cradle-to-career model, and a number of Alderbrook secondary subject leads have booked visits to our primary schools so they can start exploring how to make their curriculum more coherent to incoming students.
Place-based collaboration
As a group of headteachers, we believe that place-based partnerships across schools, whatever their denomination, are crucial to improving outcomes for all children, and especially our most vulnerable.
That is the driving force behind the South Solihull Partnership.
Tom Beveridge is headteacher at Alderbrook School
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